In Indonesia, PhD students blow the whistle on bad supervision

When Rully Charitas Prahmana went to the United States as a visiting lecturer, the academic culture shock was extreme. “I was surprised to see an academic supervisor go cycling with his PhD students on the weekend,” says Prahmana, a mathematics lecturer at Ahmad Dahlan University in Yogyakarta, Indonesia, and a visiting researcher at the Western Michigan University in Kalamazoo.

Prahmana can’t imagine that kind of interaction at home, describing himself as being in the minority for occasionally holding informal discussions with students in a warung, small street-food stalls or restaurants that are common across Indonesia. Many of his colleagues never meet their students in casual settings, he says.

PhD candidate–supervisor relationships in the southeast Asian archipelago nation are often less centred around direct scientific supervision in a laboratory or throughout a research project than in much of the rest of the world’s PhD programmes. Many early-career researchers instead say that they only meet supervisors for brief formal discussions, to sign research proposals, or to sign off on their dissertations. Students at larger and more prestigious institutions sometimes have more direct supervision, but “mostly, what we have is power asymmetry”, says Prahmana.

“I met my supervisors routinely but instead of supervising me, they were gossiping about other lecturers,” says one of 11 PhD students interviewed for this article. Several individuals requested anonymity to protect their careers.

Some described being asked to take on tasks at personal expense. One interviewee, for example, said that she had to pay for access to sampling sites before doing her wet-lab research. “I need to take out 200,000 rupiah [around US$12] every week for a year per sampling site,” says the student. All told, she was spending around $1,700 a year on her sampling work. The average monthly salary in Indonesia is around $200.

“I am sure there are many professors who treat students unfairly,” says an anonymous student in Semarang, Indonesia.

“But we are forced to accept what our supervisors say because we just want to graduate soon,” says another.

A demography bonus

Some young academics argue that the problem of bad supervisors stems from poor management of PhD programmes in Indonesia, which aims to increase its population of doctoral graduates from around 75,000 to 125,000 by 2045. Brian Yuliarto, the nation’s minister for higher education, science and technology, says that this ambition will drive economic growth. National statistical data are patchy, with broad censuses every ten years, but Indonesia has an estimated 64 million people between the ages of 16 and 30. Yuliarto describes this group — 22% of the country’s population — as “a demography bonus”, telling Nature that the nation needs “to transform them into highly qualified human resources”.

Today in Indonesia, there are 272 PhD holders per one million people, compared with around 14,000 per million in the United States, for example.

My relationship with my PhD supervisor has become toxic — what do I do?

To boost this number, the Indonesia Endowment Fund for Education, an agency that manages the country’s $9.1-million fund, has set aside money for another 2,500 PhD scholarships this year, says Yuliarto. Nearly half of these will be for those who want to pursue PhD opportunities overseas; the rest will be reserved for people studying partially or fully in Indonesia.

But only some Indonesian universities are set up to provide enough supervision to double the number of people graduating with high-quality PhDs, argues Berry Juliandi, dean of mathematics and natural sciences at IPB University in Bogor. He says that the new funding isn’t supported by strategic policies and regulations around improving academic supervision for the nation’s universities, which will therefore not be able to deliver a high-quality PhD experience.

Indonesia has 4,303 higher-education institutions. The country’s National Accreditation Agency for Higher Education counts only 226 of those as ‘highly qualified’, a criterion that accounts for the quality of not only the physical infrastructure, but also scientific prestige and experience and the teaching skills of the lecturers at the institutions.

Even at these institutions, conflicts between supervisors and PhD students are rife, says Fikri Yanda, a PhD student at Walailak University in Thai Buri, Thailand, who manages the ‘pembela_mahasiswa_indonesia’ (‘Indonesia student advocates’) Instagram account, which discusses academia in Indonesia.

So far this year, Indonesia’s ministry of education has reported 874 cases of inappropriate behaviour, including ethical misconduct, violence, sexual harassment and abuse of power.

This kind of behaviour “hampers our freedom to think freely as academics”, says Andik Wijayanto, a biology PhD student at Gadjah Mada University in Yogyakarta, because scientists aren’t able to challenge the status quo. Many students are afraid to make mistakes, he says. (Wijayanto, who also lectures in biology at the State University of Malang in East Java, says that he doesn’t have any problems with his own supervisors.)

Publishing practices

In 2017, Indonesia’s higher-education ministry found that of 5,366 professors in Indonesia, 3,800 had not published peer-reviewed papers in international journals that the government considered reputable. This led to stricter regulations that now require all professors and other university lecturers with master’s and doctoral degrees of all disciplines to publish in high-quality Scopus-indexed journals. But the policy backfired: some academics were snared by predatory journals — organizations that offer to publish papers for a fee, often using aggressive or misleading solicitation practices, while not providing legitimate peer review or adequate editorial assistance. Other researchers manipulated their citation indexes to achieve high performance scores in the government’s evaluation system.

In 2021, the ministry introduced a regulation on scientific integrity that sanctions scientists who engage in data fabrication, plagiarism and forged authorship. This was followed by another regulation signed by Yuliarto this February, which asks institutions to assess ‘scientific integrity’ when evaluating university lecturers’ performance, a determining factor for their career opportunities.

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